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Some of the most rewarding conversations I had as an engineering leader happened with product managers, even though I often hear of tension between product and engineering being a big contributor to office stress. As I look back on the positive relationships from my history, I recall a recurring behavior on both sides of the…
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People ask me what they can do to help gain visibility in their organization for the things that they’ve accomplished, especially in a department where leadership doesn’t ask for regular status reports. Should they write up a weekly report and send it out anyway? On one hand, that is a way to get some visibility,…
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The first time I was offered a remote role as a Director of Engineering, my immediate thoughts were about how I could make sure people in the remote office were staying busy. I’m embarrassed to think about that now. Now I realize that trying to monitor busy-ness is about as useful as measuring people by…
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You are a learner. Obviously you are, or you wouldn’t have reached the level you’re at. But the more you succeed, the less likely it is that you’ll continue to learn. That may sound completely backwards, but here’s what can happen. As you succeed, you can start to become attached to the identity of the…
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In many organizations, the phrase “technical debt” has become a buzzword used to complain about anything that annoys an engineering team. Unfortunately, overuse of the phrase has given some leaders the perceived permission to ignore the impact of the very real phenomenon. So, to avoid the extremes of “everything’s technical debt” and “nothing’s technical debt”……
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Invisible work. “Glue work.” The very fact that it is invisible makes it hard for you as a leader to manage. Over my career, I’ve seen many ideas on how to reign in invisible work. And most of the time, it involved creating new processes to document every request and make the invisible visible. “If…
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In my early career, delivering software products involved processes that blamed “human error” for a great many production problems. After all, the deployment steps were meticulously documented, line by line, command by command, in a giant color-coded Excel spreadsheet. All someone had to do was to follow the instructions to the letter. Well, that and…
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I’ve been experimenting with AI coding agents for a personal project of mine. One of the things I’ve picked up in the process is yet another technology principle that can apply well to our interpersonal relationships. This time, that idea is the “autonomy ladder.” With Agentic AI, this is a framework for deciding and declaring…
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One of the most common complaints that engineers often make is that their days are broken up with too many meetings that fragment their work and keep them from their optimal flow state. As a leader of engineers, you want to help. But before you look at meetings as a problem to be solved, try…
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Unless you’re working in an extremely tiny organization like a startup, your work probably has co-dependencies with other departments. The friction and stress you may feel with those other teams may not be related to the complexity of your dependencies. It may simply be a result of your cross-team communication. To those of us with…
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Retrospectives … Postmortems … After Action Reviews … Whatever you call them, there’s value in deliberately allocating time to look back on the recent past to learn lessons to improve the future. But even the most valuable discipline can become meaningless if it reverts to a routine performed merely to satisfy an external process. If…
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You know you’re capable of more, but your organization doesn’t seem to recognize it. You’re ready for broader responsibility, a bigger title, and more compensation, but you never seem to get an opportunity to show it. I know it doesn’t make it feel any better to hear this, but this situation is actually pretty common.…
Musings
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